SESSIONS

Attend 1.5 days of world-class sessions by Sitecore product developers and Sitecore community experts.

Kam Figy

Serialize all the things with Unicorn

Sitecore development artifacts are both code and database items, such as rendering code and rendering items. As developers, we use serialization to write our database artifacts into source control along with our code so that we have a record of all our development artifacts. Unicorn is a tool to make serializing items and sharing them across teams and environments easy and fun.

In this session we’ll go over what Unicorn is, why you would want it, demonstrate how to use Unicorn, and show some of the new features in the latest release.

Active Commerce: How we use SIM, PowerShell, Octopus Deploy, and Azure to automate product builds

Active Commerce faces additional challenges in supporting multiple Sitecore versions, creating Sitecore zip packages, and automating the build of over a dozen plugins. Nick will provide an overview of the process and tools that Active Commerce uses, and how you can apply the concepts in your own Sitecore project and module builds.

Bas Lijten

Sitecore might be secure, but your site isn’t!

A Sitecore installation might be hardenend, but this doesn’t guarantee you a safe website.

This session will explain the basics on secure application development for Sitecore. Using a lot of demos, I’ll show common vulnerabilities, the root causes of them and how to fix them. In the end you know what to do to write secure code!

Adam Najmanowicz

Accelerated development with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions

I will show the new features in the SPE module. What I would like my audience to learn from the talk is that building rich user interfaces multi step-can interactions be accomplished with just a few lines of code and no server restart.

The fact that you can debug those easily with the advent of 4.0 and potentially about prototyping sophisticated and flexible Web APIs easily.

Jason Wilkerson

IoT, Event Hubs and xDB, oh my!

When you configure and leverage many of the marketing features in Sitecore, you can get a very good picture of your users through the Experience Profile. All of those interactions, however, are online, either through direct interaction with your website or some other ‘connected’ channel. But what if you could gather data and interactions that happen ‘offline’ to build a more complete picture of your user?

In this session, I’ll describe how you can use Azure to gather data from any IoT device and persist that data to xDB. This can help you deliver the most relevant content to your use at the right time!

Nikola Gotsev

Super Charge your Continuous Integration Deployments

Your build and deployment process is one of the most important aspects of any project, regardless of size. If your builds and deployments break too often, take too long, or are full of manual mistakes – there is a better way!

Nikola Gotsev has been implementing and optimizing CI scenarios for some time and wants to share how he sets up a supercharged CI environment. Regardless of your build servers, project size, or complexity you can configure a fully optimized CI environment – join this presentation to learn how!

Mike Robbins

With IoT growing in popularity with devices like the Raspberry Pi, taking advantage of physical data captured by these devices can provide new personalisation options.

In this session we will look at using Bluetooth beacons to trigger events within Sitecore, based on a user approaching a physical beacon. Pushing this further we will use IoT to capture further data and record this into xDB.

Sean Holmesby

Sitecore and NuGet: Sitecore development done right

Nuget has been around since 2010, is widely used in ASP.NET development, and is the basis for the upcoming .NET Core and ASP.NET Core revamp. Yet for Sitecore development, we’ve continued to put a README in our projects, telling the user to manually copy Sitecore DLLs over to a specific folder.

It’s time for our development practices to grow up!

In this session we’ll look at how your teams can be more effective, your builds can be less manual, and how to use the new standard for open source Sitecore development.
We’ll see how to use NuGet for your Sitecore development, how to generate your own NuGet packages, perform GitHub repo build automation and avoid DLL-Hell by using this development standard.

Alistair Deneys

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start your Testing!

Although unit testing is an easy concept to grasp, applying that concept to Sitecore can be challenging.

In this presentation, Alistair Deneys will explain the complexities associated with unit testing Sitecore solutions, and show several tools & techniques to overcome those complexities so you can get started with testing straight away. We’ll be covering unit testing, integration testing and architectural considerations to make testing easier.

Kamruz Jaman

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) with Sitecore

A global presence requires global delivery. Your site might be fast from your office but what about your users on the opposite side of the world?

In this session I’ll explain what is a Content Delivery Network, why you would want to utilise one and I will show you multiple options to integrate one with Sitecore. We’ll also look at how we solved the issue of serving very large files from the Media Library by moving our assets directly into the Cloud.

Nick Hills

Sitecore xDB personalization at the client

How about we travel back in time a few years? Web pages were static, at most offering some basic forms to contact the owner of the sites. The pages being served wouldn’t change very often and certainly wouldn’t vary content user by user. Compare that to now – users expect device centric, fast, engaging and personal experiences.

A common approach for scaling out content is via one of the many Content Delivery Networks, they are geared up to handle global distribution of static content. One challenge this introduces is how to then personalize this content.

This talk shows off techniques that allow you to combine two great tools: the personalization capabilities and power of xDB along with the benefits of CDN edge-caching. Editors can configure and design personalization rules as normal yet still harness all the power and gains that CDN’s offer.

Dmitry Kostenko

Sitecore Pathfinder - Another look at the developer experience

I will introduce Sitecore.Pathfinder, a research project which explores an alternative approach to development of websites and components for Sitecore XP.

I will start with basic project setup and developer workflow, walk through the features and show how Pathfinder can be used in more advanced scenarios with continuous integration, automated testing and dependent projects.

Tim Braga

Atomic Design to the MAX

Think Atomic.

Let me show you how we embraced Atomic Design, how we built a library of reusable, flexible, and scalable components that the business is able to utilize. Join me and I will explain in detail what atomic design is, the pros, the cons and the technical challenges that come with it.

If you love engineering challenges you don’t want to miss what we have done to optimize the experience for our content authors and ultimately our visitors.

Joe Drumgoole

Introduction to MongoDB

MongoDB is the NoSQL database underpinning the Sitecore experience database xDB. In this talk Joe will explain what NoSQL is and give an overview of the different kinds of NoSQL databases and how they compare to the traditional world of relational databases.

He will then go into detail on how MongoDB makes developers more productive and allows them to build highly fault tolerant scalable data-stores for mission critical platforms like Sitecore.

Ruud van Falier

Introducing Sitecore Habitat

An introduction into the groundbreaking modular architecture example provided by Sitecore. With Habitat, Sitecore breaks the silence when it comes to a complete, real world example of how a Sitecore solution should be structured.

You will get insight into what Habitat is exactly, why it was introduced and why it’s a good practice to use it.s.

Kern Herskind Nightingale

You, me and Sitecore MVC

With a growing emphasis on MVC in the ASP.NET community, all Sitecore developers should be honing their Sitecore MVC skills.

In this session Kern will jump on the uni-cycle and do a lap of Sitecore MVC arena. As well as juggling the technical aspects of developing with Sitecore and MVC we will take a look at the how feedback technical community is helping to shape the future of Sitecore MVC.

Christina Hauge Lauritsen

Stephan Rifbjerg

Working with the Sitecore Experience Platform - an interdisciplinary discipline

How do you create value with the Sitecore Experience Platform in an easy and effective way? There are both strategical and technical challenges ahead when figuring out how to use the Experience Tools.

This session will touch upon the strategic challenges when identifying a valuable setup for a business and dive into concrete technical aspects of working with the tools on the Sitecore Experience Platform.